duckland.org

So, way back at the end of 2017, my home wi-fi was not the best it could be. I had grand plans to pull cat-6 wire and drop simple wi-fi access points (APs) and have it all working as a happy mesh-type arrangement. Well, turns out two of the pulls would have been a real pain to do and that would leave the back of the house without any improvements, so I shelved the project.

Then I find this product from a company called Luma. They offered an inexpensive 3 AP mesh wi-fi with some extras I had not thought about like parental controls, time restrictions, basic network protection, etc. Pretty nice. The main drawback for me was that I had no control over the network topology of the wireless side but I got around that. Oh, and the only way to configure it is with an app on my phone. I can remotely manage it, so not too bad. But, no local management.

Fast forward to this week. One of the kids asked me to check something on their wireless profile, so I pull out my phone, and do my thing, no worries. The next day, my wife mentions that the TV in the master bedroom is having issues streaming a movie she wanted to watch with the eldest. Sometimes, the AP back there falls off the network, and a simple logical reboot clears it up, so I pull out my phone and open the app. And I cannot log into the app. Poking around a bit, I find that the domain which the app points to is gone. Turns out, Luma was bought about 2-3 months after I got the gear, and the new owner folded the tech into their products and dropped support for the Luma.

The worse part? They had my email this whole time, and not once did I get anything from them informing me that the product I spent money on was about to become a paper weight.

So, I pulled out the repeaters from the old project, and the old AP, and I am in the process of migrating everything over to the new old AP. The major drawback is that the repeaters I have are only single-band in the 2.4G range, which is much slower than the newer 5G range. That will be the next project to update the repeaters to dual-band.

Just some of the holiday sights around here this year.

Whilst self-hosting may be all the rage today, the fact is I have been doing a chunk of it for a while.

This is the first in a series of posts about my journey to self-hosting. Will I totally move off of all SaaS (Software as a Service) apps provided by the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc? No, for the simple reason that not everyone I enter-act with does. Can I get my core stuff self-hosted? Yes.

There is a concept I ran across a while back called ‘Local-First’ which basically says that any software you use, it should store its data locally first, and then remotely as an option. Things like email. Your email client should cache your recent emails locally, so you can access them even if you do not have a network connection, but when you do have a connection, it syncs with some server.

Now, one of the other things I am going to be looking at on my journey is phone-based apps as well as my computer based apps.

My goals is to remove as much dependency on third-party providers as much as a I can for both computer and phone, for me, and for as much of the family as I can convert.

Broad area of things I will be looking at:

• Email, both storage and web-access
• Document storage
• Media (Music and Videos)
• Source control (git).
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Password management

Some of these areas I am already well down the self-hosted route, some I have done in the past but are not doing it now, and some I have not even started. I hope to over the next year or so make serious efforts in moving to more self-reliance for my hosting needs.